Strong Lensed QSOs with Variability Detectable by LSST: How many are there?

TL;DR

This study forecasts that LSST will detect approximately 1000 strongly lensed QSOs with sufficient variability for cosmological and reverberation mapping studies, highlighting the survey's potential for advancing astrophysical research.

Contribution

The paper provides the first detailed prediction of the number of variable, strongly lensed QSOs detectable by LSST using a damped random walk variability model and mock catalog simulations.

Findings

Approximately 30-40% of mock lensed QSOs will show detectable variability.

A subset of about 250 lensed QSOs will have large variability (>0.15 mag) for bright images.

Systematic uncertainties were analyzed, confirming the robustness of the predictions.

Abstract

Strong lensed quasi-stellar objects (QSOs) are valuable probes of the universe in numerous aspects. Two of these applications, reverberation mapping and measuring time delays for determining cosmological parameters, require the source QSOs to be variable with sufficient amplitude. In this paper, we forecast the number of strong lensed QSOs with sufficient variability to be detected by the Vera C. Rubin Telescope Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The damped random walk model is employed to model the variability amplitude of lensed QSOs taken from a mock catalog by Oguri & Marshall (2010). We expect 30--40% of the mock lensed QSO sample, which corresponds to $\sim$1000, to exhibit variability detectable with LSST. A smaller subsample of 250 lensed QSOs will show larger variability of $>0.15$~mag for bright lensed images with $i<21$ mag, allowing for monitoring with smaller telescopes. We discuss systematic uncertainties in the prediction by considering alternative prescriptions for variability and mock lens catalog with respect to our fiducial model. Our study shows that a large-scale survey of lensed QSOs can be conducted for reverberation mapping and time delay measurements following up on LSST.